Thermal Transfer | odonnell-portfolio

Problem -

Develop a heat sink for a high power LED lighting system that significantly reduces weight.

For a redesign of the current high power architectural lighting system, one of the main customer complaints was high weight
In order to reduce the total weight of the system, two critical areas were designated for exploration, the mounting system and the heat sink
I was put in charge of developing a heat sink that was much more efficient (weight to heat dissipation) than the previous model while making sure that it met all thermal and geometrical design requirements

Process -

I first talked to other engineers that had experience in thermal design and see how they tackled the problem
This lead to my first task which was creating an excel sheet to demonstrate the effects of natural convection and radiation
This excel sheet allowed me to quickly explore how different fin geometries and materials affected heat dissipation
From there, I moved my work to SolidWorks Flow Simulation to analyze more complicated geometries affected heat transfer
While I was doing all of this I was meeting regularly with the product development team to discuss how my current explorations might affect the design

Solution -

There was no final solution to this project because the shape and design were being worked on throughout my coop
Knowing this, I needed to document everything I did including various parametric studies and goal optimizations that I ran to show optimal design parameters such as fin spacing, orientation, heights, thicknesses, etc...
Shown below is an example of one of the flow simulations I did with natural convection
There are also four sample geometries that I tried during a brainstorming phase to see which would be most effective